Cathy Lamb: Liz and Lisa, welcome to my blog.  Let’s get crazy. Introduce yourselves then tell us about one of the craziest things you’ve ever done in your whole life.

Liz & Lisa: Hi Cathy! Thank you so much for having us. We’ve been best friends for over 25 years and have co-written two novels together, Your Perfect Life and The Status of All Things.

The craziest thing we’ve ever done? Not sure we could say that here as we have kids that can read, but a semi-crazy thing we’re willing to admit to publicly is: We both interned at The Family Feud while in college—and yes, of course, we both got a kiss from host Richard Dawson, who was famous for smooching each and every contestant!

I don’t think I’ll ask you what that kiss was like…So! Moving on, crazy ladies. (And tell me all the juicy stuff later, okay? I won’t tell a soul.)

I know that you all have been friends forever. How did you meet?

Liz & Lisa: We met in high school when Lisa walked into Liz’s freshman English class wearing red eye glasses and overalls. Let’s just say, Liz was intrigued by this girl with absolutely no fashion sense!

And from overalls and red glasses to best friends. Excellent.

Years later you decided to write a blog together and a book. Do I have the correct order? Why did you decide to jump into both?  Was it a double dare?

Ha. It wasn’t a double dare. Although Lisa may have threatened Liz at one point that they’d better start writing that book they always talked about “or else!”

We still can’t believe we’ve pulled it off without killing each other. But we just read an article about when you’re “friend married” to your bestie. And one of the signs is that you bicker about many things, but rarely fight. That’s us.

And we think that’s why we’ve made it. The reason we wanted to start a blog was to chat it up online with other people who wanted to celebrate books. Then we started writing our novels.

Glad to know that the bickering has not led to fights which can lead to body blows, women tossing other women over bars, and sword fighting. That could get messy, although it would give you all another topic to write about.

Can you give everyone a short summary of your book The Status Of All Things? And, by the way, I loved it.

Liz and Lisa: It’s about a social media obsessed woman who discovers she can literally rewrite her fate on Facebook.

After she’s jilted at her rehearsal dinner, she goes on Facebook and writes a status about something she wishes she had. Then it comes true. She starts to realize she can change the course of her life with her statuses.

The book deals with our social media obsessed culture and also focuses on fate– should you tamper with it?

I loved the magical element to it. I am a sucker for magic.  What was the spark for that bit of magic? How did it come to be a plot element?

We love books with magic in them. And we were intrigued by the idea of being able to use Facebook to make wishes. Who wouldn’t want whatever they wrote in that status box to automatically come true?

Oh, now that would be fun. Then I could eat chocolate without calories.

On your website, and in your book, you talk about how people post photos to Facebook that make life look perfect, yet none of us have perfect lives. It’s like we’re creating an illusion. 

Liz & Lisa: We are so glad you addressed this.  We very rarely post anything too personal to Facebook, like when we’re having a really lousy day, but then we realized that, we too, portray only the “good stuff.”

What made you want to address this?  Was any particular day, or time, the impetus for it?

Liz  & Lisa: We discovered that we each have what we call a “Facebook nemesis”, that person we love to hate online. Every picture they post is perfect, every status amazing. We knew these people’s lives weren’t actually as perfect as they seemed because we were also posting only our most filtered photos and only our best news. But this idea intrigued us. Why do we only put our best self out there?

I don’t put the hard stuff on facebook, usually, because it involves other people in my life. It’s a privacy issue, but it does present a certain image when only the happy pictures are posted. I had an interviewer tell me recently that, in looking at my website, it seemed I had a perfect life. I about died laughing. 

It seems like you’re both very busy. You write books, you manage and write for your website, you’re married and have kids. What guilty pleasures do you indulge in to relax?

Liz & Lisa: Omg. We both LOVE the Bachelorette. Especially this season. It’s getting quite scandalous in a good way. And Liz has recently discovered the show Flip or Flop and is now secretly wants to quit her job and start flipping houses! We’re also partial to wine and Lisa has discovered she has recently discovered she has a chocolate sorbet problem she might need to get help for.

Don’t get me started on The Bachelorette. How ridiculous is that show? Yet, I look forward to it every week. I have opinions on the whole thing…and yes, scandalous fun.

What are you working on next?

Our next novel to be published in 2016 is called THE YEAR WE TURNED FORTY.  It’s the story of three fifty year old women who get the chance to go back in time to the year they turned forty–a year they all made decisions that altered the course of their lives.

I love it. If we could ALL go back in time, just once, to fix things…

Three places you want to visit before you are 100.

Lisa: China, Japan and South America.

Liz:  Ireland, Italy and Greece

Three people you want to meet, or go back in time to meet.

Lisa: Can I say Ryan Gosling three times? And does that make me super shallow when I should be saying the name of a Pulitzer prize winning author?

Liz: I want to meet Reese Witherspoon-I’m a bit delusional, but totally think we’d be BFFS! And that couple from Flip or Flop, Tarek and Christina. They could show us how to flip houses and then we’d have them over to BBQ at our house. Oh, and Judy Blume! Because, she’s Judy Blume! Lisa recently met her and I’m so jealous!

Hello God. It’s Me, Margaret!
And thanks, ladies, for the chat.

 

A snippet of The Status Of All Things:

Chapter One

 

In less than 24 hours, I’ll be walking down the aisle.

Something borrowed, something blue? Check.

Something old, something new? Check.

The love of my life? Double check!

 

#whatcouldgowrong

 

(To everyone reading this: What could go wrong? Answer: A LOT.)

 

Friends, this is from Liz and Lisa – you have to read it.  It’s about our facebook personas…and our REAL lives.

 

Picture (im) perfect: What life looks like when we pull back the filter…

Let’s agree on something. We are all guilty of uploading a photo to Instagram or Facebook that, with just the right angle, lighting and filter makes the image look damn near perfect.  What we don’t post are the twenty pictures we took just to get the one that we then triple filtered and cropped before we uploaded it.

Understandably so, we all want others to see us in the best light (pun intended) whether we’re nestled up to our spouse looking hopelessly in love on our anniversary or our child is smiling angelically in her Sunday best or the rescue dog we adopted is greeting card cute as he pants for the camera.

And, while there’s nothing wrong with wanting to put our best self out there, the photos we share typically represent the way we want our lives to appear, not the way they actually are. So in honor of our upcoming novel, THE STATUS OF ALL THINGS, about a social media obsessed woman who gets the chance to literally re-write her fate on Facebook, we decided to post the photos that we’d typically delete faster than you can say #nofilter or #blessed.

This is our #reallife.

Click on the link for more info. http://www.lizandlisa.com/2015/05/picture-im-perfect-what-life-looks-like-when-we-pull-back-the-filter/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LizFentonandLisaSteinke

Instagram: lisaandliz

Twitter: @lizandlisa

website: http://www.lizandlisa.com/about/